A Guide to What the Times’s Bold, Flawed Climate Story Left Out

In the August 5 issue of the New York Times Magazine, reporter Nathaniel Rich spells out, in just shy of 30,000 words, how in the decade spanning 1979 to 1989, we came very close to halting climate change in its tracks, only we didn’t. Rich’s in-depth reporting links together the earliest understandings of and reports on climate change—as early as 1978, we knew that a hike in global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius would wreck havoc on the planet — with the political atmosphere at the time. The consensus, in those years, was that climate change was a collective failure, and one for which every country and every leader should assume collective responsibility.

In the piece, called “Losing Earth,” Rich tracks the work of the lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and climate scientist James Hansen as they worked to convince both politicians and the American public of the consequences of unfettered fossil fuel burning. They were certainly effective in raising awareness; as early as 1979, Exxon was launching its own research into carbon emissions to better understand how much blame it would shoulder, because the company recognized that, at that time, it was still conceivable that it might end up in hot water if government regulations were authorized. “There was a formal consensus around the nature of the crisis,” Rich writes. That consensus led to meetings among global leaders in Geneva, Tokyo, and the Netherlands, while Pomerance and Hansen continued their work on the ground in the U.S.

Read the Fast Company story by Eillie Anzilotti - “A Guide to What the Times’s Bold, Flawed Climate Story Left Out.”